There are a few computer and video games in the world that invent a new genre or redefine it. Doom for example brought us 3D-shooters, Dune II gave us real-time strategy and Diablo coined the term "Action RPG". And then, after a milestone of gaming, there is always the flood of clones. Usually, most of these copies are of lesser quality, some are as good and only very, very few actually push the genre even farther.
Titan Quest is a Diablo clone. And, I am happy to say it is a very good one. It doesn't redefine the genre but it's a very solid and good action RPG.
Like Diablo, Titan Quest got an expansion which brought a new mastery, a new world/level, raised the level cap to 75 and brought some other minor changes in the game. Titan Quest is now available together with it's expansion (Immortal Throne) as "Titan Quest Gold". I have not played TQ without it's expansion installed so this review will be for the complete package. Note that I will also make a lot of references and comparisons to Diablo and Diablo 2. Chances are, you are a fan of Diablo or Action RPG and you want to know if it can stand up to the old but still reigning champion.
There will also be minor spoilers in the review, so beware...
The storyline
Back in the old days of Greece, in the "golden age" before the Gods, there were Titans. Later in the Titanomachy - The war of the titans - the gods under Zeus overthrew them and banished them to Tartarus. Mankind flourished under the new rule of the gods and everything was well. Of course, things rarely stay well for a long time. So eventually a group of Telkines, powerful mages from the island of Rhodes are out to free the titans and set an end to the rule of the gods and in the course to mankind too. The games picks up in a small village called "Helos" were our hero starts is long journey to free the Greece and the rest of the world from the threat.
Titan Quest takes some liberty with Greek mythology but overall it all fits together pretty nicely.
Starting the game
When you start the game for the first time, you will notice the absence of classes, which is unlike most RPG's. No magician to choose from, no fighter, no rogue, no necromancer. The only thing you can choose is whether you want to play a man or woman. Your choice of skills later in the game will determine your fate, not a set class in the beginning. While I like the idea, the feature does have some drawbacks. First, there are only two player models. A guy and a girl of course. So the only way for them to look different from each other (in multiplayer for example) are different sets of armor and weapons. It would have been nice if there would have been a feature to change the built of the character model. And second... all classes have to fight with a dagger in the beginning. No starter bow for an aspiring rogue or a small mage staff or wand for a wizard.
Luckily though, you are not stuck in that beginner stage for long. After gaining your first level, you can choose from a mastery which is the basis of all character skills. After you reach the 8th level you can choose another. From that point on, only the distribution of gained skills points and your equipment define your character.
The game play
Short version: Keep clicking the left mouse button on everything that moves until it stops doing so.
Long version:
Titan Quest plays almost exactly like Diablo (or better, Diablo 2). The left mouse button is your main attack, the right one your fast access button to whatever you choose (spell, potion, skill, etc). Spells, skills and potions can also be put on the number keys. Number 9 always chugs a health potion and 0 will always make you drink an energy potion to refill magic energy/mana. Once you kill a monster, it will spill all it's items used and maybe some bonus items. Speaking with NPC's might give you further information on tasks at hand or give you side quests to solve (Which always give rewards. Usually XP and magic items.).
Like in Diablo, your inventory is a box made up of smaller boxes. Items take up a specific number of small boxes in a particular shape. A helmet is a 2x2 box sized item for example. A bow is a 1x4. Rings, potions and amulets only take up one small box, large shields might take as much as a 2x4. This way, keeping your inventory in order and maximizing the number of items you can carry turns into a kind of Tetris. Unlike Diablo, Titan Quest has an "auto-sort"-button that automatically tries to adjust the items to maximize available space, rather than let the player sort the inventory. Diablo had item durability, meaning that items could wear out through usage. Titan Quest does not have that. Items don't wear out and you also don't have to buy arrows for your bow.
Like in Diablo, the main reason to play the game is not only to level up your character but to also collect the most powerful items you can find. Item classes are set in the game, like a pine bow for example. What exact stat that pine bow has is determined at random though, making for thousands of possible items. Items of course are magical too. The game basically has five types of items:
1. non-magic: very early beginner stuff. You will very soon dump those items and wont even bother picking them up for selling them.
2. magic: for a long time, those items (with few magic attributes) will be your bread and butter.
3. better magic: more magic attributes, more punch
4. epic items: from this point on, items will get very powerful
5. legendary items: expect very powerful items.
Unlike Diablo, magic items don't have to be identified before you can use them.
In addition to the above items, you will find charms and relics (the counterpart to Diablo’s runes and jewels) that give further bonuses when combined with items. Charms an relics come in pieces. The more parts you have, the more powerful they get.
Since carrying all those items will exhaust your inventory pretty fast (even though you get three inventory enhancements during the game when you reach certain levels) Titan Quest offers a "caravan" that travels with you. Well, it's not actually travelling by your side but it is accessible in certain cities. That caravan offers additional storage space that can also be expanded twice in the game (for a fee).
The Masteries
There are eight masteries in the game. Each one gives you a set of skills/abilities to choose from. Every time you gain a level, you get three skill points which you can assign within the mastery. In Diablo, you had to be a certain level to "buy" higher skills in the tree. Here, you raise your general mastery skill (which usually gives general bonuses like strength or intelligence) and then you also have to spent skill points on the skills itself to use them. So if you want to have a skill that is at a higher level in the mastery tree, you first have to use skill points to get to the tier that skill is under and then use skill points on the actual skill.
The masteries are:
Warfare: Gives skills and bonuses on weapons in general and swords in particular, like two-handed weapon wielding.
Defense: Gives you skills on all arts of defense, especially when equipped with a shield.
Earth: Grants essentially magic bonuses of fire (fire damage, fire spells, etc.) and the ability to cast a fire creature
Storm: Same as Earth, but focused more on lightning and cold magic.
Hunting: Grants bonuses to archer skills and gives abilities connected to hunting and wildlife.
Rogue: Makes you the sneaky type with poisoned weapons.
Nature: The healing mastery. Something for the more "peaceful" fighters (well, sorta...)
Spirit: A little feeling of dark magic - gives you the ability to summon a liche.
Dream: Pure magic. Mess with the minds of your enemies to destroy them.
Since you can combine two masteries, you can essentially have 72 different character "classes" (I hope I calculated correctly). A character with the "Warfare" and "Hunting" skills is a Slayer for example. "Warfare" and "Rogue" make you an Assassin. Certain mastery trees go well with each other, others do not so well. Like in Diablo, it for you to find out what works best.
Level design, Graphics and Sound
The level are all very beautiful, well designed little worlds. Lots of little effects make the world more realistic. Water splashes when you walk at the beach or through a creek, little birds flying in the air, moving grass and dynamic shadows and clever shader-use for water surfaces make for an awesome looking game world. While in Diablo the worlds were created randomly (only very few parts of certain levels were static), the world in Titan Quest is completely pre-programmed and static. But since the worlds seem bigger and more detailed, you will not notice it that much, if at all (Unless you played the games 20 times through).
You start in Greece and fight your way through it's landscapes. Some famous buildings have their digital counterparts, like the Acropolis. On a side note: I find it interesting that everybody says Titan Quest plays in "roman times and settings". Rome or Italy is neither present in the game nor is the roman empire ever mentioned. This is Greek mythology, so don't buy the game if you think you get to be a gladiator.
After you finish off your first boss enemy (more on those later), you will continue to Egypt. The Egypt world looks like a rip-off of Diablo 2's second world, which was Egypt based too. Titan Quest actually takes a more realistic approach too as you actually go to Giza and the Pyramids and of course, the Sphinx. The next world is named "orient" and covers a big part of Asia. You will get to see the hanging gardens, travel the silk road and fight your way over the Great Wall of China. The fourth level is actually very short as it only contains the final monster of the original Titan Quest. The fifth level is the expansion and contains Greece again. This time though, you will make a trip to the underworld, the realm of Hades.
Even though the game is fully 3D you cannot rotate your camera, you can only zoom in and out. Larger landscape pieces such as houses, large trees or hills will turn transparent when obstructing the view to your character. That does not always work and you will find yourself being hidden behind something more than once, but I have not lost one life against monsters that way so it's not too annoying.
Sadly, when you advance to a different world, there is no cut scene introducing you to your new "home". In Diablo 2, we got to see very well rendered short movies that told a good story and were a nice reward for completing a world. In Titan Quest, we only get to see a good intro movie and that's it. I was actually a little disappointed.
Like I said, the graphics are a feast for the eyes. The dynamic shadows and the shaders make the world very pleasant to look at. The textures are extremely detailed and crisp (in the highest detail setting). One very interesting feature in the game is the use of "ragdoll physics". If you kill a monster, it's body will fall physically correct to the ground, down a hill, off a cliff, etc. Only sometimes it seems like you are not only killing them, but turn all the joints into universal joints as they will go everywhere. Items might roll down a hill too. While it looks nice to have something fall physically correct, it has it's downside: When monsters are alive and running around, the computer only has to calculate the graphics. If you kill one, the machine also has to calculate the physics of the body and the items. While that doesn't make a difference for one, two or three monsters dying at the same time, it sure is a difference if you kill an entire group of 5 or 6 at once (which will happen later in the game). If your machine is at the lower end of the hardware requirements, you might find your frame rate dropping drastically.
The sound is also very clear, crisp and well picked out. In a game that is very repetitive by nature (click-kill-click-kill-click...), you don't want the sound effects to be annoying. Luckily, Titan Quest delivers a very nice sound set with well placed ambient sound and background music.
Like in Diablo, each world has it's specific set of monsters. When you climb the mountains in asia for example, you will find yetis and saber-tooth tigers. In Greece, you will find monsters mostly drawn from Greek mythology. Each monster type comes in different flavors but rarely more than two. Different classes of the same monster type usually only differ in color, sometimes in size. Some monsters actually wear armor and most hold (different) weapons. It's a little more than in Diablo, where different types only had a different color but there is still not a huge variety of enemies to fight. But since they fit the scenery perfectly you won't notice too much.
Hardware requirements
The minimum system requirements according to the publisher are:
-Windows® 2000 or XP
-1.8 Ghz Intel Pentium IV or equivalent or AMD Athlon XP or equivalent
-512 MB RAM
-5 GB free hard drive space
-64 MB NVIDIA GeForce 3 or equivalent or ATI Radeon 8500 series with Pixel Shader 1.1 support or equivalent
-DirectX® 9.0c compatible 16-bit sound card
Recommended System Requirements are:
Windows XP
3.0 Ghz Intel Pentium IV or equivalent
1 GB RAM
5.0 GB or more free hard drive space
128 MB NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series or ATI Radeon X800 series or equivalent
DirectX® 9.0c compatible or Soundblaster X-Fi series sound card
When the game originally came out, those were pretty high. Nowadays, most gaming machines offer a lot more punch so you should not have problems running the game if you have a newer computer. Personally, I run it on a 1.6 Ghz notebook with 1GB RAM and a 64MB ATI Radeon X700. That is technically under the minimum requirements (the installer informs you of that) but the game runs fine on 1024x786 with medium texture resolution and minimum special fx. It still looks very good and is a lot of fun.
I have also managed to get the game running on old Dell Dimension PC's with a Pentium III processor at 966Mhz, 256MB RAM and a GeForce FX. The game runs on absolute minimum (800x600, all FX and texture settings to minimum) but is actually playable surprisingly well (even in multiplayer with two PC's). Loading times are longer though and you should not try to attack large group of monsters at once. I don't really recommend getting the game on an old machine like this though unless you are absolutely starving for a Diablo clone and can't afford new hardware. You will definitely die a lot more deaths because of machine lag.
There are two spots in the game in which on my machine there was a sever drop in framerate due to loading from the harddrive. It almost seems like the game has a memory leak at those two points because only restarting it will fix the issue (at least for me). Sadly, one of the spots is the final monster of the Immortal Throne expansion. Fighting him with a low end PC might get a little tricky.
The good stuff
Titan Quest is a very well balanced action RPG with very good graphics and sound. Some of the more annoying aspects of Diablo have been removed (item identification, item durability, always able to "town portal", etc.) and all the strengths of the genre have been preserved nicely. The mastery system gives you a very good way of customizing your character exactly the way you want without being limited to "just" a wizard or a fighter. The range of available items is impressive and can easily compete with Diablo. That gives you enough replay-value to find the "ultimate" item set for your character. But even if you decide only to play the game through once, just to see the storyline you are still looking at about 30 hours of gameplay.
I have read that people complain about the item drop rate and that good items drop too rarely. I can't really confirm that. On the contrary, I had good items drop about the same rate as in Diablo. I guess the higher up your character goes, the rarer a useful drop becomes. Don't confuse "useful" with "powerful" though. Items dropped are still awesome and pack a punch, but by the time you reach lvl 30, 40 or 50 your character becomes so specialized that you are looking for something very specific. But Diablo was no different.
The game world seems more alive than in Diablo. That is mainly because the worlds seem bigger and you actually travel through it. In Diablo, you basically ventured deeper into the world, woods, dungeons, jungels, whatever. But you always had only your homebase, the one starting city to return to. In Titan Quest, you go from one settlement to the next. It can be a small village, a big city or maybe even just a camp. In addition to that, visiting "real world" locations like the Great Wall of China (even though it's not THAT big in the game) brings more atmosphere than visiting a no named castle in Diablo.
The difficulty level rises gradually with the players ability. If are doing okay, you won't really notice a difference in gameplay. Do really good and you slay monsters left and right without any problems. But mess up your skill tree or use the wrong items and the game will get really hard pretty fast.
The not so good stuff
There are not many things on the minus side. If you look at the game from a storyline perspective, you might be a bit disappointed. Like I already said, there are no cutscenes. All the story is conveyed through talking to NPC's. Compared to Diablo, that is a bit weak. Especially since the game does start with a solid CGI movie.
Also, the boss monsters are disappointing. When I bought the game, I imagined I would be fighting Titans at the end of each world...hence the title "Titan Quest". Sadly, you only get to fight Telkines all the time. Yes, they are three different ones that fight in a different style and with different spells but they look very much the same. No impressive graphics on those guys. Some of the mid-world boss monsters are designed better. You only fight a Titan once, as the final monster in the original game. And there is a surprise in the expansion. Other than that, the boss monsters look pretty lame. And on top of that, they are pretty easy to beat, even compared to smaller boss-monsters earlier in the game.
Another thing is the fact that you can only choose between two character models, a guy and a girl. While I see the idea behind the "no predefined classes" feature, I would have liked to customize my character a little more, other than choose gender and tunic color.
There is rarely a situation where I feel that my character is really in danger (unless I do something really stupid). The difficulty level of Titan Quest is balanced out almost too good. But the main reason is that there are no huge hordes of monsters. The mobs are all pretty small (rarely more than 5-7 monsters) and are so far apart that you don't risk activating another mob while fighting one.
The verdict
Titan Quest is good. Very good. Definitely a recommendation for action RPG fans. And even though it has it's flaws, the programmers have done one thing right: They made the game flow. Item drops, change in scenery and monsters, side quests, level-ups... all that is balanced so good that you want to continue playing. Just like Diablo, the game can be addictive. One more mob of monsters, one more level, one more cool item. That keeps you going and that keeps the game going. The game is not better than Diablo or Diablo 2 was, it's not even as good. But I have not met an action RPG that is, even with Diablo 2 already being eight years old. But I would put Titan Quest very close to Diablo. And so I can recommend it without hesitation as a very good, solid and addictive action RPG worthy of being amongst the Top 5 of all times. And with the price being $30 including the expansion, it's a must-buy for fans.
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